Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Recipe Flashback: Beef Wellington

Hello everyone! Today we're sharing a 'recipe flashback' from one of last year's hit recipes - beef wellington. I remember when I first set out to make this dish, I thought it would be the most difficult cooking challenge I would ever take on. At the time, it was the most complicated thing I had ever attempted to cook, but little did I know that it was far from a difficult recipe. This is one of my favorite recipes from Jamie Oliver's cookbooks. It's relatively easy to make, full of great flavor and really an impressive dish to put on the table at the end of the night. So, here's a little bonus reading, our June 2010 recipe (original blog post titled 'Eye Of The (Culinary) Tiger'

Begin by preheating your oven to 350 degrees. Peel and chop the carrots, onion and potatoes. Make sure to chop everything into as small of pieces as possible. This will help you out a lot later on. Next, place your veggies in a large frying pan and add two 'lugs' of olive oil. Add your rosemary now as well. Cook the veggies for about 8 to 10 minutes, then add a handful of frozen peas.

I tossed in an extra carrot at the last moment

Fryin' the veggies

I mentioned yesterday that I've never liked peas. I don't like the flavor, I don't like the texture and frankly, I'm not fond of the color either. They are, in my opinion, an all around terrible vegetable (and I'm convinced they may be poisonous) While looking over the ingredients for the beef wellington, I noticed 'frozen peas' and immediately thought "omit". Then I started thinking. Since Maggie and I have started this new way of cooking, things have changed. We can no longer eat any kind of fast food - our bodies just 'reject' things that are too poor in quality or overly greasy. We now can taste the preservatives in other foods as well. Things that have been prepackaged and frozen have a very different (read: gross) flavor in comparison to something we've made fresh. Lastly, our taste buds' preferences have changed. Foods (mainly veggies) that I never used to care for, I'm finding myself enjoying. The best example of this was last week - with my fruit salad recipe. I included fresh grapes, something that I never really enjoyed growing up. However, after returning to them last week I've found that I now LOVE grapes. They were absolutely fantastic and - honestly, I wish I had some right now...

My (long and drawn out) point is this - if my taste preferences are changing, maybe I SHOULD put peas in this recipe. Maybe, just maybe, I'll find I actually like the little green beasts. So, after much deliberation, peas have been included in my beef wellington recipe.

You better not be deadly...

Once all of your veggies are starting to brown up - pour them into a large bowl and set aside to cool. While that is cooling, you can begin to prepare your dough. Take the two sheets of puff pastry and lay them on top of each other. Lightly dust the countertop and the rolling pin with flour and squish the sheets down into a 12 X16 rectangle. (I didn't really measure here - I just rolled until it the pastry became thin and said 'eh, close enough!')

A pinch of flour on the countertop

And on the rolling pin make your life a lot easier

Next, crack your egg into a bowl and mix well with a fork. By now, your veggies should have cooled to the point where you can handle them safely without burning your hands. Add your ground beef into the bowl with the veggies. Pour in 1/2 of the egg as well. Now, using your hands, mix everything up really well in the large bowl. This is very similar to the cracking burger recipe. Get in there and get messy (and you WILL get very, very messy) the better mixed up everything is, the better your end result will be.

Mixing in all up

(Here is where chopping your veggies into smaller pieces will help you. To help me this evening, Maggie chopped the potatoes, carrot and onion before I got off of work. However, we found out that they weren't chopped small enough when I started mixing everything by hand. The potatoes were large enough that they were interfering with everything mixing together. This adds extra time and effort into mixing everything together. Learn from our experience and avoid the hassle by chopping everything up into tiny bits)

When everything is mixed, turn your attention to the (now flattened) puff pastry. With the longer edge facing you, spread out the mixture (as pictured below) along the dough. Once everything is dispersed, begin to roll everything up like a large taco shell. This part is a little tricky - just work slowly and make sure everything stays together and you will be alright. Crimp the ends of the pastry once your finished rolling and rejoice - you've just made a wellington.

One wellington

Take the remaining portion of your beaten egg and brush it across the top and sides of the wellington. This will help the outer crust become nice and golden brown while cooking. We don't have a pastry brush, so I improvised and used the next best thing. A paper towel. Turns out, the end of a paper towel saturated in egg works very well as a brush! Once the entire wellington is covered - stick the little guy in the oven and set the timer for 40 minutes.

When in a pinch, a paper towel works just like a pastry brush

Once that timer goes off, you can begin making your honey roasted carrots. Roasted is a bit of a misnomer here - they are actually cooked on a stovetop. Must have been one of those "sounds better this way" naming scenarios.

Add your water, carrots, honey and butter into a large pot and bring everything to a boil. Allow the butter to fully melt and mix everything together really well after this and then reduce the heat and cover the pot with a lid. Allow to cook for 15 minutes, shaking the pot occasionally to prevent the carrots from sticking. (Alternatively, you can use a large spoon to stir, but be quick. The entire concept here is the small amount of water will 'flash steam' the carrots. Every time you take off the lid, you lose valuable steam and heat.) Once the timer goes off, your carrots and done and so is your wellington.

Adding the touch of honey

Slice your wellington like a loaf of bread (don't worry about the contents falling out, everything sticks together very well after baking) and serve with a big spoonful of your honey carrots and enjoy!

The Results:

Oh

My

Goodness!

Tonight's recipe was, in a word, FANTASTIC. The beef wellington was full of flavor. The meat was incredibly juicy and flavorful and the vegetables all added their own unique flavors to create this perfect symphony of flavor. I was hoping for good thing from this recipe, but I wasn't expecting this. Next to the french baked potatoes from an earlier blog, this may be my favorite dish so far. Fantastic. I highly recommend you try making it for yourself. Heck, buy the ingredients and I'll come over and make it for you. It's THAT GOOD.

The honey 'roasted' carrots were a nice surprise as well. They ended up being nice, soft, cooked carrots with a light hint of honey. A delicious side dish that would compliment any main dish very well. These are also worth a look.

When it was all said in done, I'd say I conquered this recipe with relative ease. There were some tricky parts. However, nothing was too unbelievably difficult or overly taxing. In the end, I think I was letting all of the pictures and descriptions get to me. Taking it one step at a time, this recipe wasn't nearly as hard as I had originally thought.

One last note. You may have noticed in that first picture of the wellington - mine sprung a leak during cooking. I rolled the dough a little too thin in one spot and the juices from the hamburger oozed right out during cooking. Outside of that one small incident - this recipe came off relatively accident free. As of this moment, I'm still sitting here. (Meaning the peas haven't killed me yet). I can't really say if I've come around to them yet. I never really had a chance to taste their individual flavor. However, after a brief return to my diet - peas have proven to be not as horrible as I remember. Maybe (maybe) they will make another return to a recipe. That all depends on me surviving the night....

****

Of course, I survived the night and found that peas are not as bad as I thought. In fact, I have no qualms about throwing them into any recipe I try now. (I've grown a lot as a cook in a year!) This ended up as one of our greatest recipes in the early days of the blog. Since then, we've tried countless recipes (around 200 if you decided to count) and had a lot of great dishes that surpass this dishes final flavor. But it's the original successes that you always remember. This is a great recipe to try for home chefs still building confidence, for a family that wants something new without having to buy lots of expensive ingredients, or for the experienced chef looking to have a little fun in the kitchen. Any way you slice it, this is a great recipe to try.

That's all we have for you this evening. I'm back in the kitchen tomorrow night with a brand new recipe, one that features an ingredient I'm not overly fond of - but who knows, maybe like peas, I'll grow to like it. You don't know until you try cooking with it a few different ways right? Stop in tomorrow night to see what I'm talking about. Until then,

Out of the culinary

The young chefs

About Us

Tyler and I are two young professionals, who aren't completely professional in cooking. We simply got tired of eating pre-cooked and frozen meals and decided to do something about it. Our goal here is to take the (sometimes) daunting culinary world and bring it down to the everyday level. Essentially, we're two non-chefs showing you how to cook like a chef. It's not always perfect - but it is always fun!